Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat

At the Factory

1929

D48

D. Mirlas

In Dnepropetrovsk

For a long time I knew, understood and felt that one needs to know and to rep-

resent workers, but what would this look like in reality? My first sensation was 

awkwardness. I did not know how to behave, what to look at, what to draw. All the 

instructions from Moscow, poorly remembered anyway, were completely forgot-

ten. A typical incident. In the tube-rolling workshop, I started to draw the rolling 

mill with a feeding mechanism. Near it stood a worker, and he inserted a bar of 

iron into the mill. This was the only person tending the machine, and he was very 

involved with it. I began to draw this. One of the workers, who displayed interest 

in what I was drawing, on the spot observed that this feeding mechanism was 

obsolete and, according to the regulations, a worker should not feed bars of iron. 

He asked that this not be sketched “for the newspaper.” Quite embarrassed by 

this valid observation, I chucked out this drawing and again set out to roam about 

the workshops . . .

We still have very few images of working reality, when objects are manufactured. 

This theme is no less majestic than the ancient biblical creation of the world . . . 

Even a short period of recuperation at a factory has a curative eff ect on the psyche 

of the artist, who still suff ers from all sorts of illnesses of a bourgeois influence in 

his art.

Originally published in Russian as D. Mirlas, “Na zavode,” 

Iskusstvo v massy 5–6 (September 1929): 16–17. For a German 

translation see 

Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstde-

batten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 

420–21.

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

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384

For New Methods of Work 

1930

D49

The Shock Brigade of AKhR (Grain State Farm no. 2)

Rogov, Merkulov, Tsamaia, Vysotskii, Meretskii 

The experience of work of the shock brigade of the OMAKhR at State Grain Farm 

no. 2 merits great attention. Each brigade of artists and each individual artist, 

engaging in the struggle for socialist construction, for the industrial and financial 

plan, needs to go from the position of an observer and “depicter” to the position 

of an active builder of life.

Precisely here lies the path of the most fruitful creative search for elements of 

proletarian style in art. 

To date the plan of great works—the Five-Year Plan—does not apply to the artist. 

Stirred up by casual inspiration “from order to order,” he “creates” in isolation 

from life. 

Exhibitions are full of irrelevant things. Seldom does one encounter canvases that 

represent our construction, and even then in comparison with the stormy move-

ment of reality they seem like extracts from an archive and are illustrations of the 

shameful tempos in the visual arts. 

Obviously, this cannot continue . . .

The fundamental points in the plan of work established by the shock brigade were 

the following: 

The desire to represent the state farm not in individual finished canvases, but 

rather to create a full series of canvases in the manner of studies and sketches, 

executed in a pre-conceived manner, breaking down the theme of the state farm 

into basic moments. In short, not individual easel things, but a complex of works, 

fulfilled by the collective on one general theme. 

Taking the state farm under our patronage in the area of artistic design and artis-

tic influence in the plan of tasks, being carried out by the state farm . . .

The bureau of shock brigades of AKhR under the direct participation of cells of 

the VLKSM of the Grain Trust entered into an agreement with the Grain Trust. 

A plan of work for the brigade was worked out and approved, according to which 

within a five month period it should complete an exhibition of one hundred can-

vases in a sketch manner and as many studies, according to the following condi-

tions:

All production, completed by the brigade, will belong to the Grain Trust.

The authors will not receive remuneration for individual works. 

For the course of all five months, the brigade will receive the minimum necessary 

for life at the state farm. 

The brigade will consist of five persons, receiving all materials for work at the 

expense of the Grain Trust and AKhR.

Entering the agreement and receiving the assignment from the Bureau of Shock 

Brigades of AKhR, on May 8 the brigade left for its place of work at the State Grain 

Farm no. 2 in the Northern Caucasus. 

On arrival to the state farm, the brigade experienced suspicious treatment from 

the administration. However, this is easily explained by the large quantity of “in-

spectors,” “researchers” and observers who have inundated the state farm.

Immediately upon arrival they put together a working plan for each day of the first 

month. The workday was set at eight hours, of which two hours were for com-

munal work. They started with sketches and examination of the state farm and 

instantly came into close contact with the worker’s committee and the Komsomol 

[Communist Youth League] cell. The first production conference, designed by 

the brigade, introduced it into the tempo and life of state farm production . . . 

The work of the artist was silent, but decisively acknowledged as equivalent to all 

other types of work at the state farm. Tractor driver – tractor – field; artist – ea-

sel – wall newspaper—all of this was tied together and valued all the more when 

our artistic youth willingly gave up their brushes for the usual state farm work. All 

together—the merging into the life of the state farm, the battle by artistic means 

for the production plan, active participation in production work, work on the wall 

newspaper—this turned out to be the best creative raid, the truest method for the 

disclosure of relevant artistic images . . .

Originally published in Russian as “Za novye metody raboty,” 

Iskusstvo v massy 7 (July 1930): 36–37. For a German 

translation see 

Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstde-

batten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 

422–24. 

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

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On the Upcoming Soviet Exhibition 

of the October Group in Berlin

1930

D50

Durus, A. I. Gutnov and F. Tagirov

A New Kind of Artist: From the Studio to the Factory

Two Russian artists, October group members Gutnov and Tagirov, happen to be 

in Berlin. Our colleague D(urus) managed to speak to them on the occasion of the 

upcoming exhibition.

The artist is joining the working class. Among other things, they remarked: in the 

Soviet Union, a whole new kind of artist has emerged. Many of our artists have al-

ready stopped working as detached “intellectual” workers in the vacuum of their 

“studios.” For the artist, the studio is being replaced by the industrial plant, the 

factory. The artist is becoming an industrial worker, working with other industrial 

workers in the factory.

Instead of the old, manual principles, art has taken on the economic, technical 

and psychological basis of the socialist factory. And as for the individualistic art-

ist? The petit bourgeois artist-anarchist, with his bumptious notions about some 

supposedly “pure” art drifting up in the clouds somewhere, is dying out. Through 

his participation in material production he stops being a petit bourgeois individu-

alist, a petit bourgeois anarchist. He takes on the collective psychology of the 

revolutionary proletariat. His factory collective collaborates on his art works, in 

the putting together of a design plan for a club with the critical involvement of 

the workers, for example. The artist’s client is no longer the patron but the factory. 

The workers revise the artist’s initial designs. The artist’s collaborative work with 

the masses of the industrial proletariat has had cataclysmic results on the greater 

part of Soviet art.

An important principle of October, the most progressive revolutionary group of 

proletarian artists in the USSR, is that the artist must serve the socialist way of life, 

the building of socialism, and the struggle of the Russian proletariat on economic, 

political and cultural fronts. The artist must work either as part of collective in-

dustry or as an agitator and propagandist. In the October group only six artists 

are still producing work in studios, while a further 240 are already aff iliated with 

factories and production plants.

The artist should concern himself, not with the development of his own artistic 

personality, but rather with playing his part in improving the circumstances of 

the working classes. Art that fails to challenge class enemies or to bring about a 

change in ways of life (as an ideological and industrial-collective means of produc-

tion) is useless and socially pointless art. In the age of industrialization and collec-

tivization the artist must shed his personal “aesthetic” idiosyncrasies and devote

himself instead to the collective duties of the new society and of industrial works 

and factories in particular.

The Masses as Artist

As opposed to current approaches to painting?!

We believe that painting can no longer fulfill the considerable demands made of 

us by the five-year plans. The idea of the masses as artist is increasingly replacing 

that of the individual artist in the plan.

1

 

Our art is primarily geared, not towards the backward strata of the “peasantry,” 

but rather towards the most progressive sectors of the industrial proletariat as it 

advances the realization of the Five-Year Plan. (We obviously take the special re-

quirements of villages into consideration as far as possible. We’re not dreamers.)

The struggle for a new life and for a new mankind are the main aims of the Soviet 

Union’s most forward-looking artists, cultural revolutionaries in the truest sense 

of the word. Proletarian culture, however, emerges not from a group of artists 

but rather from the ideological struggle among all groups and above all through 

the artistically self-reliant strata of the proletariat itself. Through the work of the 

worker-draughtsmen and the worker-photographers, through the impact of the 

agit-prop groups (TRAM), etc.

A. I. Gutnov, secretary of October, curated the Berlin exhibition and gave lectures as part 

of the show. At the time he was working on the presidential campaign with John Heartfield.

 —AH-L

1.  The first signs of this were already to be seen in pre-Nazi Germany: worker/artist correspondents; collective 

movements to decorate entire streets with placards, banners and red flags for revolutionary mass celebrations; 

agit-prop groups; the typographic and pictorial lay-out of factory newspapers by anonymous comrades [Ed.]

Originally published in German as Durus, A. I. Gutnov, and F. Tagirov, “Zur bevorstehenden Sowjetrussischen Aus-

stellung der Gruppe Oktjabr’,” 

Rote Fahne (Berlin, September 19, 1930); reprinted in Zwischen Revolutionskunst und 

Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. 

Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 189–90.

The version here has been translated from the German original by Andrew Davison.

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386

It is Necessary to 

Study Poster Design 

1931

D51

Dmitrii Moor 

. . . A reproduction of Titian’s 

Venus was hung in the exhibition of posters at KOR. I 

have several of the questionnaires completed by visitors to this exhibition. Here is 

one of them: “Why has this woman found nothing better to do than to strip naked 

and look at herself in a mirror?” This was completed by a woman worker. Here is 

another: “A naked dame looks in a mirror. They print this thing here in the USSR 

and hang it in exhibitions, where teenagers can look at it.” These two documents 

expose to criticism the reality of Titian. The protest of a woman against the act 

of gazing at herself, as if at bedding accessories, is the protest of a woman who 

does not want to go about in the world of the mother of God or the prostitute 

Mary Magdalene, it is the protest of a woman builder who is equal in rights. The 

person who thinks that there is a moral here does not understand anything—

it is a 

thoughtful, reasonable real protest. This thing is unreal for contemporary women 

in the present life that is being built. But Titian, as you know, was realistic in his 

time and even very much so. We will attempt to draw some conclusions from this. 

Artistic-figurative realism is one of the methods of class struggle that purpose-

fully organizes class emotion, and the perception of the class knowledge of the 

artist, which by the selection of means (linear, volume-spatial and color) is com-

pacted into the pictorial expression intrinsic to the artist. It actively establishes a 

single visual surface, accessible for understanding and reaction by his class. 

Every time has its own class dictate, its own selection of means, its own composi-

tion and color, its own emotion. Reality is diff erent for each time. 

. . .

Content-Theme-Subject

Content is the movement of the struggling class, the movement of the part to-

wards the whole, the process of actual life. Content is class struggle, and this 

must be clearly envisioned. Class influence is the mandate for the artist to use the 

means of art to call forth, sharpen and direct emotion and the will of the viewer in 

a particular direction . . .

. . . For the poster, the content is the class struggle, and hence when determining 

the theme for a poster it is necessary to clarify specifics of the processes that give 

rise to an image. The editor must clearly understand all of these processes and 

provide their details to the artist. Unfortunately, often editors do not furnish this 

to the artists, because they themselves do not understand the definition of con-

tent for the poster. Often when receiving an assignment for a poster, I in no way 

can understand what the editors understood by the word “content,” while these 

processes should be clearly established by the editors. 

Theme is the political task for today, hence the precise knowledge of these politi-

cal tasks. 

Subject is the slogan, hence the precise establishment of the limits of action of a 

slogan and its placement according to theme. 

What is the Poster Form? 

The most complete definition of the poster form is: The most purposeful mass 

thematic and maximally laconic form, having the aim to organize the emotion 

of the masses, like a will, towards action according to the dictates of class. This 

is delivered through background unity, thematic color, color laconism, graphic 

quality of execution, made with accountability to printing materials, and printed 

on paper. 

Originally published in Russian as Dmitrii Moor, “Oformleniiu plakata nado uchit’sia,” 

Brigada khudozhnikov 4 (1931): 

10–16. For a German translation see 

Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kom-

mentare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: 

DuMont, 1979), 438–40. 

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

Resolution of the Central Committee 

of the VKP(b) about Poster-Picture 

Agitation and Propaganda

1931

D52

§ 1. The Central Committee recognizes the intolerably scandalous attitude to-

wards poster and picture aff airs on the part of a variety of publishers . . . this has 

found its expression in the publication of a significant percentage of anti-Soviet 

posters and pictures. 

[Commentary]: Recognizing the scandalous state of poster aff airs, the resolution 

of the TsK VKP(b) about poster and mass pictures in essence pronounces a sen-

tence upon the entire front of the spatial arts . . . 

. . . The poster and the mass printed picture penetrate into all nooks of communal 

life and are an irreplaceable visual means for the ideological re-education of the 

broad masses. The party cannot ignore this mighty weapon of influence, espe-

cially when this weapon rather often turns up in the neutral or enemy hands of 

opportunists and philistines . . . 

Each poster should be a strike against the enemy, it should be able to expose 

and evaluate reality, it should intervene in life and truly change it in the interests 

of the proletarian revolution. It should not be a neutral, apolitical, abstract, self-

absorbed art . . . 

§ 3. It is resolved to ask the TsKK-RKI (Central Control Commission and the Peo-

ple’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection) to investigate the matter 

of the publication of ideologically harmful posters and pictures and to call to ac-

count the concrete culprits . . . 

§ 6. It is resolved to require the periodical press to arrange the systematic review 

of published picture-poster production . . . 

§ 7. It is resolved to involve the fine arts section of the communist Academy, the 

Central Committee of Rabis and Glaviskusstvo for practical assistance in poster-

picture aff airs. It is resolved to organize a special society of poster artists in order 

to improve the ideological-artistic quality of posters and pictures, and also to em-

ploy the Institute of Red Professors for political consultation hearings. 

§ 8. It is resolved to organize within IZOGIZ a workers’ council of representa-

tives from the largest industrial enterprises of Moscow, to establish the order 

for preliminary discussion of IZOGIZ’s publishing plans at enterprises, with the 

enlistment of male and female workers for comment upon them and discussion 

of sketches, and also for the review of completed picture-poster production by 

means of the organization of traveling exhibitions and so forth. 

[Commentary] On April 5 the first session of the workers artistic-political council 

within IZOGIZ took place . . .

Twenty-two posters were presented . . . 

As a result, the workers editorial council rejected 50% of the viewed production 

(eleven posters). Two posters were accepted without changes, and eight posters 

received suggestions for reworking . . . 

The council noted as known achievements two posters published by IZOGIZ: 

We 

are Mastering Technology by the artist Deineka and The USSR is the Shock Bri-

gade [of the World Proletariat] by the artist Klucis.

§ 9. It is resolved to unite within IZOGIZ the publication of all mass picture-poster 

production. 

Originally published in Russian as “Shto znamenuet i kak vypolnetsia reshenie leninskogo shtaba? Postanovlenie TsK 

VKP(b) o plakatno-kartinoi agitatsii i propaganda,” 

Brigada khudozhnikov 203 (1931): 1–3. For a German translation 

see 

Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstdebatten in der 

Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 434–35. 

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

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Resolution on the Reconstruction of 

Literary and Artistic Organizations

1932

D53

Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party

(Bolsheviks)

The Central Committee states that over recent years literature and art have made 

considerable advances, both quantitative and qualitative, on the basis of the sig-

nificant progress of socialist construction.

A few years ago the influence of alien elements, especially those revived by the 

first years of NEP,

1

 was still apparent and marked. At this time, when the cadres 

of proletarian literature were still weak, the Party helped in every possible way to 

create and consolidate special proletarian organs in the field of literature and art 

in order to maintain the position of proletarian writers and art workers.

At the present time the cadres of proletarian literature and art have managed 

to expand, new writers and artists have come forward from the factories, plants 

and collective farms, but the confines of the existing proletarian literature and art 

organizations (VOAPP, RAPP, RAPM,

2

 etc.) are becoming too narrow and are ham-

pering the serious development of artistic creation. This factor creates a danger: 

these organizations might change from being an instrument for the maximum 

mobilization of Soviet writers and artists for the tasks of socialist construction to 

being an instrument for cultivating elitist withdrawal and loss of contact with the 

political tasks of contemporaneity and with the important groups of writers and 

artists who sympathize with socialist construction.

Hence the need for the appropriate reconstruction of literary and artistic organi-

zations and the extension of the basis of their activity.

Following from this, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party 

(Bolsheviks) resolves:

1. To liquidate the Association of Proletarian Writers (VOAPP, RAPP).

2. To unite all writers who support the platform of the Soviet government and who 

aspire to participate in socialist construction in a single Union of Soviet Writers 

with a communist faction therein.

3. To carry out analogous changes with regard to the other arts.

4. To charge the Organizational Bureau with working out practical measures for

the fulfillment of this resolution.

This resolution, passed on April 23, 1932, marked the culmination of a series of measures 

that had been curtailing the artist’s independence (e.g. the decrees “On the Party’s Policy 

in the Field of Artistic Literature,” 1925, and “On the Production of Poster Pictures,” 1931). 

Before the 1932 decree there had been attempts to consolidate artistic forces by establish-

ing umbrella societies, such as the All-Russian Union of Cooperative Partnerships of Visual 

Art Workers (Vsekokhudozhnik) in 1929, the Federation of Associations of Soviet Artists 

(FOSKh) in 1930 and the Russian Association of Proletarian Artists (RAPKh) in 1931, but such 

organizations had retained a certain independence of the political machine. The direct 

result of the 1932 decree was to dissolve all off icial art groups immediately; and although 

the proposed single Union of Artists of the USSR (SKh SSSR) was not convoked until 1957, 

a special committee was organized in 1936 to take charge of all art aff airs except those in-

volving architecture and the cinema—the Committee for Art Aff airs Attached to the Coun-

cil of USSR Ministers; in turn, the decree prepared the ground for the conclusive advocacy 

of socialist realism at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 (see pp. 388). 

For reactions to the decree see 

Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let, ed. Ivan Matsa (Moscow-

Leningrad, 1933), pp. 645–51.

The text of this piece, 

O Perestroike literaturno-khudozhestvennykh organizatsii, ap-

peared as a separate pamphlet in 1932; it is reprinted in 

Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let, from 

which this translation is made; it has also been reprinted several times since Matsa.

3

— JB

1.  The period of the New Economic Policy (1921–28) was marked by a partial return to a capitalist economic system.

2.  All-Union Federation of Associations of Proletarian Writers (Vsesoiuznoe ob”edinenie assotsiatsii proletarskikh

pisatelei, VOAPP); Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (Rossisskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei,

RAPP); Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (Rossisskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov, RAPM).

3.  For instance, in 

Assotsiatsiia Khudozhnikov Revoliutsionnoi Rossii, comp. I. Gronskii and V. Perel’man (Moscow,

1973).

Originally published in Russian as “O perestoike literaturno-khudozhestvennykh organizatsii. Postanovlenie TsK 

VKP(b) ot 23 aprelia 1932 goda,” 

Partiinoe stroitel’stvo 9 (1932):62. It is reprinted in Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let, ed. 

Ivan Matsa (Moscow-Leningrad, 1933), 644–45, from which this translation is made. It has also been reprinted sev-

eral times since Matsa, e.g., in 

Assotsiatsiia Khudozhnikov Revoliutsionnoi Rossii, comp. I. Gronskii and V. Perel’man 

(Moscow, 1973).

The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from “Decree on the Reconstruction of 

Literary and Artistic Organizations,” in 

Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, ed. and trans. 

John E. Bowlt, rev. and enlarged ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 288–90. 

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